but the sentiment seemed to be that it was best to avoid extensions since desktop developers might accidentally write WebGL apps that are broken on mobile devices with less extension support.

Well, npot is an OES ratified extension, as are 4 others of my suggestions, and everything else except one is on the best way towards ratification.

I've always taken issue at the stance to restrict WebGL to ES functionality only. Are we now going to restrict WebGL to less then OpenGL ES too?

I don't understand the 'now' here: WebGL has always been more restrictive than OpenGL ES when it comes to extensions.

The npot textures extension was indeed not supported out of concern about lack of support by mobile hardware. I don't feel very strongly either way, but at least nothing changed and the approach here has always been consistent.

Benoit

I fail to see the logic in that. Those are OES extensions, OES developers can use them, WebGL developers are OES developers (or at least thats what we're supposed to be), so git.